FouadAjami

THE END OF PAN-ARABISM

olitical ideas make their own realities. Often in defiance oflogic, they hold men and are in turn held by them, creating aworld in their own image, only to play themselves out in the end,shackled by routine problems not foreseen by those who spun themyth, or living past their prime and ceasing to move peoplesufficiently. Or, political ideas turn to ashes and leave behind thema trail of errors, suffering and devastation.

An idea that has dominated the political consciousness of mod-ern Arabs is nearing its end, if it is not already a thing of the past.It is the myth of pan-Arabism, of the Vmma Arahiy'^a Wakida DhatRisala Khalida, "the one Arab nation with an immortal mission." Atthe height of its power, pan-Arabism could make regimes looksmall and petty: disembodied structures headed by selfish rulerswho resisted the sweeping mission of Arabism and were sustainedby outside powers that supposedly feared the one idea that couldresurrect the classical golden age of the Arabs. As historianBernard Lewis summed it up little more than a decade ago,allegiance to the state was "tacit, even surreptitious," while Arabunity was "the sole publicly acceptable objective of statesmen andideologues ahke.'" What this meant was that states were withoutsufficient legitimacy. Those among them that resisted theclaims of pan-Arabism were at a disadvantage —their populationsa fair target for pan-Arabist appeals, their leaders to be over-thrown and replaced by others more committed to the transcen-dent goal. Now, however, raison d'etat, once an ahen and illegitimatedoctrine, is gaining ground. Slowly and grimly, with a great dealof anguish and of outright violence, a "normal" state system isbecoming a fact of life.

No great idea passes from the scene without screams of anguish,protests of true believers, and assertions by serious analysts thatthe idea still stands-battered, transformed but standing nonethe-less-and debate about the vitality of pan-Arabism continues, forit is still far from accepted that the idea has been eclipsed. Writingin the July 1978 Foreign Affairs, Walid Khalidi reaffirmed the

s.Tlu: Middle East and Oie West,'^ev/'iorW. Harper and Row. 1964, p. 94.

Fouad Ajami is Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University andcurrently Research Fellow at The Lehrman InstituLe in New York City. Thearticle is drawn from a paper presented at The Lehrman Institute.

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vitality of the pan-Arabist idea. He observed that the Arab systemis "first and foretriost a 'Pan' system. It postulates the existence ofa single Arab Nation behind the facade of a multiplicity ofsovereign states. . . . From this perspective, the individual Arabstates are deviant and transient entities; their frontiers illusory; theirrulers interim caretakers or obstacles to be removed." Before the"super-legitimacy" of pan-Arabism, the legitimacy of the Arabstates "shrinks into irrelevance." In such a system, "explicit ortransparent rais<m d'etat is heresy ."̂ What is normal for others isabnormal in the Arab world. Since Arab states are really deviantentities, which in time will pass from the scene, they are to beconstrained in what they do for statehood, Nothing less than apan-Arab superstate will do.

A second view is that of Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, once thepropagator of Nasserist ideology and today one of the bearers ofthe myths-in President Sadat's pejorative description, one of thehigh priests of the Nasserist temple. Heikal, who once made thedistinction between Egypt as a state and Egypt as a revolution, andwho defended the right of the "Arab revolution" to interfere inthe internal affairs of Arab countries, now grudgingly concedesthat the state has triumphed over the aspirations of pan-Arabism.He has recounted a conversation he had with Secretary of StateKissinger during the latter's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle Eastm which he told Mr. Kissinger that Egypt was not merely a stateon the banks of the Nile, but the embodiment of "an idea, a tide,a historical movement." To this Mr. Kissinger is reported to havesaid that he himself could not deal with latent intangible forces, ornegotiate with an idea.

The Sadat diplomacy-of which Mr. Heikal is a critic-seemedto sustain the Kissingerian view. The idea that Heikal oncebrandished in the face of Nasser's rivals has lost its lure and power.Everyone, laments Heikal, recognizes that "the idea, the tide, thehistorical movement" is absent and that the party sitting across thenegotiating table is the Egyptian state with its limited frontiers,resources and calculable interests.^

Heikal has reiterated this view that the Arab system is on thedefensive, that "it has been forced to retreat in disarray," in thisjournal. Egypt, "for so long the mainstay of the Arab system," hasopted out of it; the opportunity afforded by the October War of1973 to put the system on solid foundations was lost, with the faultpresumably in the decision-maker's judgment. Faith intrudes,

^ Walid Khalidi, "Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian Siaie"Forngn Affairs lulv1978. pp. 695-96 (emphasis added). •» -u .J 7

^ Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, mAl Anwar (Beirut). April 15, 1978,

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however, for Heikal ends on an upbeat note. The Arah systemmay suffer a temporary setback, but it could bounce back (presum-ably when the Eg>ptian decision-maker sees the error of his ways),because the Arah world possesses a vitality that makes "the realconstituency of any Arab leader the Arab world as a whole."^ Onceagain, the leader's constituency does not end with the boundariesof his state: even when the idea is violated, it still possesses sanctityand recuperative power.

The story of pan-Arabism's retreat goes deeper than Sadat spolicy. And, to be sure, it has nothing to do with Mr. Kissinger'sdiplomacy, for, whatever the carrots and sticks in his bag, Mr.Kissinger could not remake Arab history or defeat a compellingidea. The willingness of the Egyptian state to be more like otherstates-to negotiate for itself-had nothing to do with Mr. Kissin-ger's diplomatic tactics, but was rather the result of changes andtransformations within Arab politics itself. Reason of state hadalready begun to prevail in inter-Arab affairs, and pan-Arabismhad lost its hold over the popular imagination several years beforeKissinger appeared on the scene with a distinct preference for an"Egyptian solution" and an aversion to dealing with "historicalmovements."

II

Pan-Arabism's retreat began in 1967 after the Six Day War,which marked the Waterloo of pan-Arabism. In the immediateaftermath of the war there was no competing system of legiti-macy-in fact, very little if any legitimacy remained in Arab politicsas a whole. The regimes had survived, but the defeat had dis-honored practically all of them and had devastated, in particular,the pan-Arabists in Cairo and Damascus. No regime could havegone its separate way then. The "radical" regime in Cairo wouldcapitulate to the will of the oil states led by Saudi Arabia, but theoil states would not press their victory too far or too hard. Themilitary defeat was sustained directly by the armies of Egypt, Syriaand Jordan-for all practical purposes and in terms of inter-Arabpolitics, by Egypt-but the defeat had underlined the vulnerabilityof the Arab system of states, the bankruptcy of the Arab order andits guardians, whether radical or conservative. The champions ofpan-Arabism were defeated in the Arab system; the idea had lostits magic. Yet particular states were still captives of a status quoerected by the defeat, which they could neither undo nor indefi-nitely live with.

* Mohamed Hassanein Heikal. "Egyptian Foreign PoVicy," Forngn AJfairs.}n\y 1978. p . 727.

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Opportunity to break out of that situation and to assert reasonof state would arise with the October War. The irony is that thewar which Mr. Heikal and others looked at as an opportunity torevive the Arab system, was precisely the event that would enablereason of state to challenge the then feeble but still veneratedpretensions of pan-Arabism. The logic that triumphed in October1973 was not the pan-Arabist one held up by Nasser and the Baath,it was the more limited notion of solidarity preferred by thosestates that had long opposed pan-Arabism. What President Sadatwas to do subsequently was read the results of October 1973-moreaccurately perhaps, to use the results-and to stake out a largeterritory of independent prerogative for Egypt and himself. Whatmight have been an Eg>ptian temptation between 1967 and 1973,particularly under President Sadat in the second half of thatperiod, could be done in the aftermath of the October Warbecause it was only after that war that the man at the helm of theEgyptian state was in command. The "honor" of the state had beenredeemed. Egypt's sacrifices and what Mr. Sadat called "the size ofthe victory" on the Egyptian-Israeli front-presumably larger thanit was on the Syrian-Israeli front, as it had been nonexistent on theJordanian and Palestinian front-would be used to legitimate abreak with the Arab system.

Times had changed; so had the leader in charge. Whatever hisfrustrations with the Arab system-and they were plentiful —Nas-ser was too much a captive of that system to break with it in thesame manner and to the same degree as Sadat. Given his personalmakeup, his history, the constituency he had acquired, and theimages he had manipulated, the best Nasser could do was moder-ate his policies and set the stage for someone less tied to thepolicies of the past. Even in defeat Nasser was still a pan-Arabhero: his victories lay in the Arab system, for after 1967 there wasvery litde left in Egypt to point to with much pride.

Whatever his dreams were prior to 1967, Nasser was a changedman after the Six Day War. He was willing and able-or almostable-to strike a bargain with none other than King Faisal of SaudiArabia, and for the last three years of his life he managed to forgean alliance with the Jordanian monarch, who had long been one ofhis political rivals. Finally, he would accept the Rogers Peace Planand implicitly renounce much of what he had stood for in the past.His pan-Arab constituency (that part of it which did not defect,that is) was of course willing to extend to him the benefit of thedoubt. His reconciliation with Saudi Arabia was stormy andproblematic enough to exonerate him in the eyes of his followers.His alliance with King Hussein provided rather more material for

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disillusionment, for his ally was the enemy of the Palestinians. Buthere again, as Malcolm Kerr so aptly put it, Nasser's "incredibleluck stayed with him into the grave," for, to most of his followers,he "died as a martyr to the cause of Arab brotherhood" as a resultof the strain of the Jordanian civil war negotiations and his concernfor the plight of lhe Palestinians.^ As for his acceptance of theRogers Peace Plan, that could easily be brushed aside. To this veryday his followers maintain that it was a tactical decision, buyingtime to prepare for another military round. The burden of thepast was far too heavy to have allowed Nasser the same margin formaneuver even if he had wanted to abandon the pan-Arab cause.

Anwar Sadat had never excited a pan-Arab audience and hadnever been a hero. But if he lacked the hero's stature, he alsolacked the hero's reputation, and was free of the chains that tieheroes to their great deeds. If anything, Sadat would find it a bitgratifying —and this is only human —to slay the myth of hispredecessor, a man he had once known as an equal and who hadmanaged to rise above Sadat and other colleagues to heroicproportions in no small part through the love and devotion ofpeople in distant Arab capitals. Sadat could hope to compete withhis predecessor in Egypt proper, but in the Arab world hispredecessor was larger than life. Perhaps in Sadat's "Egyptianness"there is a desire of sorts to move from Nasser's shadow into asmaller arena where his predecessor is more subject to errors andto a normal, more tangible audit.

With the pan-Arab hero out of the way, the conservative Arabstates would find it easier to deal with his successor, a less ambitiousman, more accepting of boundaries and ideological differences.That is why Sadat could enlist those states in a joint endeavor liketbe October War, a feat which Nasser might never have been ableto accomplish. That Sadat would eventually go further down theroad of autonomy than the limits preferred by the oil states is oneof the supreme ironies of recent Arab politics. Where the oil statesonce feared Egypt's meddlesome politics, they lived to experiencethe fear of her disengagement from pan-Arab responsibilities. Thethreat that once emanated from her radicalism and pan-Arabismreceded; a new threat came from her separate and independentnationalism. Of all the Arab states, Egypt is the largest, the mostpolitically stable, the most legitimate within her boundaries. Thisenabled Egypt to give pan-Arabism concrete power, and then,when she tired of it, to turn inward. The oil states had wantedfrom Egypt an abandonment of the pan-Arabist ideology and

* Malcolm Kerr. Tbe Arab Cold War, New York; Oxford University Press. 1971, p. 155.

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acceptance ofthe logic ofthe state system, and they got that. WhatSadat's diplomacy was to show was that states —or, more preciselyand aptly, the leaders of states —could read their interests differ-ently and independently.

I l l

Sadat's diplomacy was the most dramatic illustration of theweakness of pan-Arabism and objectively the most important, ifonly because Egypt had been, as Mr. Heikal rightly states, "themainstay of the Arab system." But throughout the precedingdecade there had been other "revolts," other "separatist" attacksagainst the monolithic pan-Arab doctrine. It is only within thecontext of those other attacks that the Sadat diplomacy can becorrectly situated in Arab politics.

The Palestinians launched the first post-1967 attack against pan-Arabism. Given their predicament, their economic and politicaldependence upon the Arab states and their lack of a territorialbase, theirs had to be a different kind of attack. But there was nodoubt that those who rallied around Yassir Arafat and GeorgeHabash in the aftermath of the Six Day War had given up on pan-Arabism—the first group in the name of Palestinian nationalism,the second in the name of social revolution. The duel that ragedbetween the Palestinians and the Nasserites from early 1968 untilNasser's death in 1970 was in essence a fight about the independentrights of Palestinian nationalism. If the Arab states could notprotect themselves against Israel, let alone do something for thePalestinians, then the latter were to construct their own indepen-dent politics. In the fmal analysis, it was Arafat's brand ofnationalism, with its pledge of nonintervention in the internalaffairs of Arab countries, that found its way into the organizedArab state system, rather than George Habash's revolution. Ara-fat's narrow focus on Palestinian nationalism and his avoidance ofsocial and ideological issues were in keeping with the new tenor ofArab politics, and that is why Arafat's course found a reasonablemeasure of support in Riyadh: in his strict Palestinian nationalismthere was an acceptance of reason of slate. That acceptance wasnot applicable to the two "sanctuaries," Jordan and Lebanon,hence the two civil wars in which the Palestinians came to beinvolved.

Another crack in the pan-Arab edifice was the virtual end oftheBaath Party, the pan-Arab party that took seriously its mission ofbringing about the one Arab nation. A shell called the Baathremains, and it claims power in both Iraq and Syria, home to theBaath in the post-World War II years, but President Hafez al-

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Assad is cut of different cloth. A cautious member of a minoritysect, he harbors no illusions about Arab unity and is probably thefirst leader in modern Syrian history to make peace with Syria'snational situation and to accept the limitations of geography andresources. Since his rise to power in 1970, he has managed to ridSyria of a great deal of its romanticism and extremism, and tomove it to the center of Arab politics. To do so, he put an entiretradition behind him by accepting a reconciliation with KingHussein, and abandoning the infantile Baathist notion of bringingEgypt into the pan-Arab fold and making her do their bidding forthem. He has also tried, as his cumulative record in Lebanonwould demonstrate, to tip the scales against those with a penchantfor extreme solutions. Thus, in June 1976, he intervened againsthis former allies — the leftist Palestinian/Muslim alliance —and thenin February 1978 against the Maronite Christian militias when itbecame clear to him that their aim was nothing short of partition.

The threat of a partitioned Lebanon is yet another seriouschallenge to pan-Arabism in a decade of setbacks. This challengecomes from an area that never accepted the idea of Arabism butmade a peculiar kind of peace with it, namely, Christian Lebanon.As long as the Arabists accepted Lebanon's unique identity andsituation, Lebanon could find its role and place in the "Arabfamily" as a link between the Arabs and the West: as a place forthose who played and lost in the game of politics and needed aplace to write their memoirs or plot their return to power; as aplayground for Saudis and Kuwaitis who wished to escape theclimate and puritanism of their own countries; as a banking havenfor Syrians who wanted to flee from the politics and intrigues ofthe military and the economic irresponsibility of would-be social-ists. Lebanon, so it was believed, could have it both ways: live offthe Arab world yet think of itself as a piece of the Occident.Arabism was far away; one could pay homage to it and go aboutthe business of trading, publishing, smuggling, banking.

This worked as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict was removedfrom Lebanon's soil —a situation that changed after 1970, whenthe Palestinians, expelled from Jordan, made their political homein Lebanon. Then the glib, superficial Arabism of Lebanon met atest it was destined to fail. The leaders in the Christian communitywho had known the Arab system and made their peace with it lostto those for whom Arabism and Islam were synonymous, and whobelieved in their own cultural supremacy and the backwardness ofthe Arabs. Convinced that they were being abandoned by the West(they too had heard of the "decline of the West"), resentful of thepost-October 1973 wealth and prominence of the Muslim Arab

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states, losing control over a country that had gotten too "Palestin-ianized" and radicalized for their taste, aware that the demo-graphic facts were shattering the myth of Christian majority, theMaronites would do what would have been unthinkable yesterday:after a brief reliance on a Syrian connection, they opted for abreak with the Arab system —an alliance with Israel and a fullcommitment to partition.

Through it all, the advocates of partition would be helped bythe obvious culpability ofthe Arab states, which had exported the"sacred Arab cause" —the Palestinian issue —onto Lebanese soil. Inother words, the least Arab of countries, as well as the weakestmilitarily, was to bear the brunt of full Israeli retaliation and toaccept a parallel and competing system of authority. Sincere ornot, the Palestinian slogan of nonintervention in the internalaffairs of Arab countries was harder to practice than to preach.With Israel more than willing and able to retaliate for raids intoher territory, the Lebanese formula would unravel. The gift of anenlarged Lebanon bequeathed by the French turned into a night-mare, and the Maronite militias took up arms, first to defeat theleftist Palestinian/Muslim alliance and then, a little later, to try tocarve out their own state, bidding farewell to the pleasantries of"Arab brotherhood." They were now willing to state what hadbeen their conviction for quite some time: that they think ofthemselves as a different breed; that they are apart from the Arabworld, not geographically but culturally of a different world. TheSyrian army may win a confrontation or two, but what must behonestly and candidly dealt with is a bid for partition and creationof a sovereign Maronite state. If anything, Syrian assaults steel thewill of the militias and silence those in the Christian communitywho still believe that things could be managed with a sHghtlyreformed version of the old status quo.

IV

In an otherwise across-the-board break with the universalism ofpan-Arabism, it was only the young group of officers who came topower in Libya in September 1969 who would raise the old bannerin the decade that followed the 1967 defeat. Qaddafi and his fellowofficers were more royalist than the king, more true to AbdulNasser than Nasser himself, nostalgic for the young Nasser andbent upon reenacting his drama with all its noisy color and vitality.Libya, insulated from the Arab world, was thus to go through thesame stage that Nasserites and Baathists had gone through in thepreceding decade. The principal difference between Qaddafi'sgroup and yesterday's unionists was that the former combined.

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perhaps for the first time, two forces that had generally been atodds in recent Arab history: oil and pan-Arabism. From Egypt andSyria the unionist movement had been a claim by poor states forthe "collective" wealth of the Arab world. The Libyan case was toprovide just the opposite: an affluent society wanting to unite withits poorer neighbors.

Determined to realize the old dream, Qaddafi would seek unitywith as odd a candidate as Bourguiba's Tunisia, but Egypt was thereal focus of his aspirations. For four years he would urge unityupon both Nasser and Sadat, although one suspects that the offerswere made in a different spirit to each: he would "offer" Libya toNasser, while he wanted to "steal" Egypt from Sadat.

In both the Tunisian and latter-day Egyptian cases, Qaddafi wasurging unity on two older men for whom he had little if anyregard, whom he thought he could eventually push aside. To aMuslim Arab soldier like Qaddafi, Bourguiba can only seem like acompromised Francophile, symbol of a by-gone age in whichArabs accepted the supremacy of the West and aped its ways. Asfor the pre-October 1973 Sadat, Qaddafi could hardly be blamedfor the low opinion he held of him-after all, that was a more orless universal judgment. During that transitional and difficultperiod when Sadat lacked his own source of legitimacy, many ofNasser's followers in and outside of Egypt came to think ofQaddafl-"a/ walad al majnun" Sadat called him, "the crazy boy"-as the spiritual son and true heir of Nasser. As it turned out, thesource of Qaddafi's appeal lay more in Sadat's seeming ineptitudethan in anything that Qaddafi himself had done. Thus, whenSadat flnally made good on his promise to break the militarystalemate, the Qaddafi appeal came to an end. The October Warmight not have been the glorious achievement that Sadat made itout to be, but it was an achievement nonetheless- Egypt was onceagain a country with a leader, and Qaddafi's bid for unity could bepushed aside. Reenacting the past had had its day.

Neither the fire and passion of the Libyan revolution nor itsmoney could turn history around and revive an exhausted idea.Since their seizure of power in 1969, Qaddafi and his fellowofficers have gradually come to see the differences among Arabsthat had previously eluded them. The contrived boundaries had areality after all. (They ought to know that, for their own ratherstrict immigration policies contradict all their talk of pan-Arabism.)Here and there a few writers and publicists-not to mention sometroublemakers-prospered on Libyan money repeating Qaddafi'sslogans about his Third Theory, or carrying out his wishes inBeirut and Cairo. But this was not to be Qaddafi's era, for he was

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already an anachronism. With its wealth and small population andits relative isolation from the traumas and wounds of Arab history,Libya may go on a little longer with more sound and fury aboutpan-Arabism, but its experiment and ideas are irrelevant to theneeds and situations of other Arab states.

A social scientist at Kuwait University has supplied us withimportant evidence substantiating the demise of pan-Arabism andsuggesting the shape of things to come. Taking a sample ofstudents from practically all Arab countries, he administered aquestionnaire to nearly 500 undergraduates at Kuwait Universitywith the aim of ascertaining their views on pan-Arabism, family,state and religion. What he found was a remarkable assertion ofIslamic sentiment and of patriotism associated with particular Arabstates —in other words, the vacuum left behind as a result of thedemise of pan-Arabism is being filled by religious belief on onelevel and by loyalty to the state on another. His data led him toconclude that the discussions of "one Arab nation" and "Arabbrotherhood" are myths and exhausted slogans.^

This shift in belief corresponds to concrete changes in thedistribution of power in the Arab system. Power has shifted to thestate (Saudi Arabia) that has long been a foe of pan-Arabism andhas traditionally seen itself as a guardian of the turath, the heritage,or Islam, to be more precise. Muslim universalism is a saferdoctrine than the geographically more limited but politically moretroublesome idea of pan-Arabism; the "48 Muslim countries and700 million Muslims" is a safe and distant symbol, giving asemblance of "super-legitimacy" without posing a threat to reasonof state. Summit conferences like the one held in Lahore in 1974and institutions like the Islamic Economic Conference appeal tothose who wish to speak of the resurrection of Islam withoutshackling the power of the state. No one wants to unite SaudiArabia and Bangladesh, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates.The only challenge that Islamic sentiment might pose would comefrom far below the world of state elites, where a militant, popularkind of Islam may reject —as it does in Iran, and to a lesser extentin Egypt —the world view and preferences of state elites. But that,at least in the Arab context, is a different problem from thedisruptive doctrine of pan-Arabism, for it is a challenge containedwithin the boundaries of the state.

• Tawfic Farah, "Group AfTiliations of Universiiy Students in the Arab Middle East (Kuwait) "Rcpons and Research Studies, Department of Political Science. Kuwait University, 1977. I amdeeply grateful to Professor Farah for sharing with me his findings and for a helpful discussion ofthe issues discussed here.

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The boundaries of Arab states have been around now for nearlysix decades. It is not their existence which is novel, but their powerand legitimacy-the power (as much as that power exists in themodern state system) to keep pan-Arab claims at bay and effec-tively to claim the loyalty of those within. They are no longer as"illusory and permeable" as they used to be. The states that liewithin them are less "shy" about asserting their rights, morenormal in the claims that they make.

The Arabs who had once seemed whole-both to themselvesand to others - suddenly look as diverse as they had been all along.The differences, smothered over by ideology and by a universalis-tic designation, can in no way be ignored or suppressed. Indeed,the more they are blanketed over by a thin veneer of superficialuniversalism, the more dangerous they become, if only becausethey create resentment on the part of those who do not feel thedesignation and who judge that Arabism places them at a disadvan-tage-that is, it used to ask some of them to fight and die whileothers did not, or to use their territory as sanctuary for guerrillaraids while others were safely insulated by ceasefire lines and U.N.troops, or to pay for the economic inefficiency and large popula-tions of sister states.

The Arab system of states will have to search for a newequilibrium, for a more limited and perhaps more workablesystem, because concrete and irreversible changes have alreadytaken place to make interstate boundaries harder and morelegitimate. Six factors that enabled pan-Arabism to slight boun-daries and to play havoc with sovereignty are either things of thepast, or are undergoing fundamental metamorphosis:

1. The universalism of pan-Arabism derived to a considerableextent from the universalism of the Ottoman Empire of which theArab states had been a part for four centuries, ln other words,scholars, officials and officers slipped from one universalist systeminto another. It was an understandable response to the nationalismof the Young Turks: if the Turks were a nation, so too were theArabs. But whatever unity was lent to the Arab society by theuniversalism of the Ottoman system now belongs to the past. TheOttoman experience has been committed to history, and sixdecades after its collapse it is becoming a fading memory.

2. Arab nationalism rested on the power and popularity of thepamphlet and the book; it was conceived and spread by intellec-tuals, mostly those in exile. From Europe, where publicists likeNeguib Azoury Shakib Arslan, and later Michel Aflaq of the Baath

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Party conceived their ideas, the distinctions among Arabs seemednegligible, almost nonexistent. It was theory written from afar bytheorists concerned with and consumed by large-scale distinctionsbetween rival and whole civilizations.

Now the power of intellectuals is waning, with a definite backlashin the Arab world against the written word and intellectuals. Thebeneficiaries are either men of affairs schooled in the hard knocksof politics —a Hafez Assad rather than Michel Aflaq —or develop-ment-oriented elites. In contrast to the literary intellectuals whodominated the early stage of Arab nationalism, the new elite is amore sober, less grandiose group —less likely to emphasize theabstractions of Arab unity, more sensitive to the realities on theground or more committed to specific tasks. A nationalism thatfails to create a political order cannot withstand the dissolution ofits creed, and the intellectuals were temperamentally unfit tocreate such a concrete order. It is one thing to polemicize aboutthe "one nation" and its metaphysical base, but quite another toerect it on the ground.

3. The anticolonialism of the mandate years lent a great deal ofunity to the Arab system, as an entire generation was traumatizedby what they saw as the Arabs' betrayal by the West. The BalfourDeclaration and the Sykes/Picot agreement made their imprint ona large number of Arab nationalists, wherever they were, andforged a strong bond of unity among officials, publicists andofficers who thought in terms of the Arab and the West.

However, what we observed of the Ottoman Empire prettymuch applies as well to the anti-Westernism of the mandate years.Britain and France, the two powers whose deeds and diplomacyhaunted and traumatized a generation of nationalists, have beencut down to size; they made their last stand in the Suez affair andsince then their diplomacy has, on the whole, been sympathetic tothe Arab states. London is no longer a hostile capital wherediplomatic schemes are hatched against the Arabs; in fact, it hasbecome familiar and accessible, with whole sections that have been"Arabized." The British, once resented and admired masters, nowcovet Arab investments and worry about the penetration of theirsociety by Arab capital. France has become synonymous withCharles de Gaulle: an admired symbol of nationalism and, from1962 onward, a "friend" of the Arab states. Beyond this, there hasbeen a subtle and steady "growing up," a realization by Arabs thatthey have no monopoly on trauma, so to speak, that they are notthe only ones whose ambitions have been thwarted and to whomhistory has dealt a raw deal or two. Worldly success in the aftermathof October 1973 is to a great extent responsible for this shift.

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4. There was a mobile, trans-state elite that moved from oneArah state to another; they knew and understood one another andtheir horizons transcended the boundaries of a single state. They"believed implicidy in the existence of an Arab nation: in schools,in barracks, in the Ottoman parliament, in exile in Cairo, and inthe Sharifian forces they had come to know each other andacquired the ease of discourse which possession of a commonlanguage and a common education gives."^ Some of these menformed the nucleus ofthe group that rallied around the HashemitePrince Faisal as he came out of the Arabian Peninsula to becrowned in Syria and later (having been driven out of Damascusby the French) to rule over Iraq.

That mobile structure of dynasts, officers, officials and scholarshas by now been replaced by more "parochial" elites as the usualcomplex of bureaucratic interests has developed in each of theArab states. The change may be best captured by comparing theleading Arab dynasty in the early and middle parts of this centuryto the leading dynasty today. The Hashemites thought of theArab world as their domain. They ruled in the Peninsula and, withthe help of the British, established monarchies in Damascus(Prince Faisal's short-lived Arab kingdom), Transjordan and Iraq.Of all that, a modest throne remains in Jordan where a skilled buthemmed-in monarch tries his best to survive and to reconcileconflicting claims and pressures. Today's leading royal house, theSaudi family, is committed to its own sovereignty in the blessed(materially and spiritually) piece of land it has. The victory of themore "local" Ibn Saud over the "pan-Arab" Shariff Hussein half acentury ago may have been the first victory (albeit of a dynastic/tribal kind) for reasons of state over the more grandiose ambitionsof pan-Arabism. Below the dynastic level, the same shift in favorof parochial elites is equally evident in the usual occupations thatstates generate. To be sure, technocrats, teachers and skilledworkers migrate in large numbers from the populated Arab statesto the richer oil states, but these are people who migiate for aliving and are content to leave power to the host governments.

5. The Palestine defeat in 1948 was seen as an injury to the prideand integrity ofthe entire Arab world —not strictly as a Palestiniandefeat, but as a pan-Arab one. The creation of Israel was a deeplywounding and traumatizing experience, a symbol of Arab weak-ness and backwardness, a reminder that whatever the Arabs werein the past, whatever their old glories and achievements, they werenow in decline, at the mercy of others, no longer sovereign in their

' Albcn Hourani, Arabic Thou^in ihe Liberal Age, New York: Oxford tJniveraiy Press. 1962. p.292.

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own region. Having vowed to undo the "shame" of the defeat, itbecame difficult for any state to take itself out of the conflict.

The unity forced onto the Arab world by the Arab-Israeliconflict has eroded —perhaps less dramatically than in other areas,but eroded nonetheless. Whatever the future shape of the conflictbetween the Arab states and Israel, the Sadat diplomacy hasdragged the Arabs —with great numbers of them shouting, object-ing, feeling violated and betrayed —into the modern game ofstates. The conflict is no longer about Israel's existence, but aboutits boundaries; and in inter-Arab affairs, the leading military statehas for all appearances rejected the inter-Arab division of laborthat assigned it the principal obligation for a pan-Arab cause.

6. Finally, from 1956 (after Suez) until Nasser's death in 1970, oruntil the 1967 defeat, the power of pan-Arabism derived from thepower of charismatic leadership. Prior to the emergence of Nasseras a pan-Arab savior, the idea had been an elite endeavor ofpublicists, intellectuals and a few officers. Nasser would take thetheories and the emotions to the masses, give pan-Arabism itsmoment in the sun, and then its tragic end in 1967.

The politics of charisma, however, have passed from the scene.T. E. Lawrence once expressed a stereotype about the Arabs thathas managed to stick: "Arabs," he said, "could be swung on anidea as on a cord. . . . Without a creed they could be taken to thefour corners of the world {but not to heaven) by being shown theriches of the earth and the pleasures of it, but if on the road, led inthis fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who had nowhere tolay his head and who depended for his food on charity and birds,then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration."^ Todaythe idea and the prophet are gone: the man who could in a speechexcite youth in West Beirut, Amman and Baghdad against theirgovernments is no longer there, and this has contributed to thenormalization of the Arab state system.

The circumstances that produced the ebb of Nasserist charismamay be sui generis, but the end of Nasserism is a piece of a biggerpuzzle. It is the end of that stage of Third World history repre-sented by men like Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, Nkrumah-dreamerswho sought what one of them, Nkrumah, described as the "king-dom of politics." In that kingdom they sought answers to questionsof identity and self-worth, dabbled in dreams and intangibles, buttheir politics were bound to come to an end, for the sort ofnationalist fervor they embodied triumphs for a moment butcannot last forever.

' T. E. Lawrence, Sewn Pillars of Wisdom, Harmondsworth (England) and Baltimore: Peniniin.1962, p.4I.

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The exhaustion of the nationalist fervor generally signals acoming to the fore of economic issues and demands, of problemsthat do not lend themselves to solo performances, to the magictouch of charisma. Less colorful leaders, whose links to thenationalist struggle are often tenuous, are the ones who have tosatisfy the new needs. With defeat in 1967, charisma turned toashes and the conservative oil states made their financial helpcontingent upon a new style and kind of politics. The romanticphase of nationalism is over, then, as it falls upon the secondgeneration to accomplish the technical and often grim tasks ofgovernance. Anwar el-Sadat's recent autobiography, In Search ofIdentity, is really the last of its kind.** The next time an Egyptianhead of state writes an autobiography, I suspect that identity willnot be the principal thread; he may have to name it "In Search ofProductivity" or something similarly routine. Whoever he turnsout to be, he may well be envious that one of his predecessors"philosophized" about revolution, while the other talked of iden-tity.

VI

Whether the Arabs like it or not, what they are left with andwhat they increasingly must acknowledge is a profound fragmen-tation of the Arab existential and political crisis. We know thethemes and memories that lent unity to their consciousness andhistory: one language, the classical golden age of Islam, the declineof the Muslim order, the universalism of the Ottoman Empire, theyearning for independence, the traumas of being initiated into aninternational system in which they were not full participants, thePalestine defeat, the Six Day War, and finally October 1973.Particular regimes and leaders aside, Arab states are stuck withone another, and the shared themes and concerns could conceiva-bly provide a basis for a working regional order—or, if pushed toofar, for disaster and continuous discord.

The shared themes and concerns must not obscure the fragmen-tation. There is no longer a collective Arab crisis and there is nouse pretending that it exists. To illustrate, let me briefly sketch theseparate and quite different dilemmas of several populations inthe Arab world.

In Egypt, the serious life-and-death issue is economic, and themain struggle is for human worth and dignity in a crowded,economically pressed society. For a young educated Saudi, Kuwaitior Libyan, the sky is the limit: huge projects to run, European

• Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity, New York: Harper and Row. 1977.

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vacations, investments, offers from foreign businessmen and peo-ple with all kinds of schemes, dreams and gadgets.'" For a youngand equally skilled and educated Egyptian, the overwhelmingreality he has to deal with is unemployment or a dead-end job in asluggish bureaucracy and the impossible dream of making endsmeet, the nightmare of finding and affording an apartment inCairo, where rentals have gone sky-high thanks in part to theabundance of petrodollars. Is there a mystery to the frustration ofthe young Egyptian, his suspicion that he must go to Sinai and faceIsraeli arms while others talk of pan-Arabism in London andParis? Is this not the reality that President Sadat so masterfullyevoked when he spoke of "nightclub revolutionaries"? The wealthyArab states have been somewhat helpful to Egypt, but Egypt'seconomic needs are staggering, and it is these needs and grievancesthat enabled the Egyptian President to do what he did on theforeign policy front.

Whether Sadat's diplomacy stands or falls, it will do so on itsown merit, judged in terms of what it will or will not do for Egypt;charges of treason, or tribunals against Sadat by Iraq or Libya willbe to no avail. But foreign policy can be a ruler's escape, andvictories and virtuoso performances are easier to pull off in distantplaces than at home. The noted Egyptian analyst Lewis Awad hasrecently argued that much of what Nasser did in foreign policywas sheer escapism.'' The same temptation may again presentitself, this time by irrelevant talk about threats in the Horn ofAfrica, challenging the Soviet Union, and the like. For Egypt, thereal threat is at home: a huge population that must be fed andeducated; a decaying capital; an overcrowded society that mustseek an economic role in the surrounding region, and musttherefore avoid too sharp a break with its neighbors.

The Fertile Crescent offers a striking contrast to the Egyptiancase. There, the crisis is political; it is a crisis of political legitimacy,of taming political passions, of finding a framework that satisfiesthe aspirations for self-determination. Lebanon and the Palestinianquestion are the two outstanding political problems and, barringsome unforeseen solutions to both, that area is destined to suffermore of the bloodshed and violence that have become its lot.

Without a territorial base of their own, the Palestinians wouldstill have it within their power to disrupt the Arab system of states.This power derives not only from their presence in Lebanon and

*" Malcolm Kerr, "The Dilemmas of the Rich," Near Eastern Studies Center. University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles. 1977.

" Lewis Awad, The Seven Masks of Nasserism, Beirut: Dar al Qadaya, 1977 (in Arabic).

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Jordan, and their influence in Kuwait, but also from their appealto an overwhelming body of opinion throughout the Arab worldthat wants what it thinks an appropriate resolution to the Palestin-ian question: self-determination for the Palestinians. Both histori-cal-emotional factors and the cold logic of reason of state overlaphere, for it is believed that the best way of taming Palestinianradicalism is to contain the Palestinians within their own state,either autonomous or linked to Jordan, and that only then will theArab system of states be effectively normalized.

The Palestinians, too, have come to see it this way. Whereas itwas once heresy to speak of an independent Palestinian state —after all, Palestine was supposed to be part of a larger Arabentity —the Palestinians have come to realize that they too requirethe normalcy of statehood. Their view has come to converge withthe recognition of most Arab states that their own reason of statevis-a-vis Palestinian claims is best served by the Palestinians acquir-ing their own territory with all the responsibilities such a processusually entails. This explains President Sadat's insistence duringthe Camp David negotiations on a linkage between an Egyptiansettlement and a framework for the West Bank and Gaza Strip,and explains as well Saudi Arabia's cautious response to thesummit.

All of the crucial or affected Arab states see in the resolution ofthe Palestinian question an enhancement of their own sovereignty:the Lebanese could then begin to put together a shattered countrywhose economic role is perhaps irretrievably lost; the Saudis andthe Kuwaitis would feel more secure about their own wealth, lesssusceptible to disruption; the Egyptians —and even the Syrians-would be freed from a military confrontation that they couldneither win nor disengage from without damage to their interestsand legitimacy. The Jordanian position is admittedly the mostthorny and troublesome, for it is clear that there are, in inter-Arabpolitics, two claims to the West Bank: Jordanian and Palestinian.King Hussein's claim rests on Jordan's sovereignty prior to 1967;the Palestinian claim is the more standard nationalist claim of apeople to their territory, and it is that claim which the Arab stateshonored during the Rabat summit of 1974.

Since then, there has been an undeniable erosion in the powerof the Rabat resolution that declared the Palestine LiberationOrganization "the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinianpeople." President Sadat's call upon the Jordanian monarch to"shoulder his responsibility" indicated where the Egyptian Presi-dent stood. King Hussein's reluctance to get off the fence displays

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the caution of a man deeply pessimistic about the intentions of thestate that currently holds the West Bank. And, in the absence ofsome firm signs that Israel is eventually willing to relinquish theWest Bank, King Hussein is likely to continue to do what he hasbeen doing for the last decade, namely, staying within the limits ofan overall Arab consensus, and urging restraint and caution onthe part of other Arab actors. But should signs of an Israeli changeof heart materialize, the inter-Arab struggle for the West Bank,now somewhat subdued and repressed, would come to the fore.Hard choices would then have to be made by the Jordanianmonarch, by the Palestinians themselves, by the Syrians, who claimboth sides of the fight as their friends, and by the Saudis, whohelp to subsidize and sustain both the PLO and Jordan.

In the oil states, there are the problems of managing greatwealth and then of setting that wealth and what it builds next tothe violence and instability of the Fertile Crescent and the povertyof Egypt. Saudi Arabia, the leading oil state, understands whatJohn C. Campbell calls the "political fragility" that lies beneath itsprosperity.'2 Having helped exorcise the area of Nasserism, theSaudis were willing to deploy the oil weapon in the October War,to subsidize the two Arab combatants and, when the war was over,to try to keep them together. Their distinct preference is for a"moderate" Arab system of states based on a reasonable measureof consensus. The preferred Saudi design is what I have describedelsewhere with no claim to originality as a "trilateral" design, atriangular system of power bringing together Saudi Arabia, Egyptand Syria.*^ The Saudi predilection for this arrangement explainsmost of Saudi Arabia's inter-Arab politics as of late: try to bringSadat back into the Arab fold without squeezing him too hard; bailout Hafez Assad, subsidize his incursion into Lebanon, and makesure that he does not tilt toward the rejectionists.

Above and beyond particular foreign policy decisions, the oilstates will continue to experience the difficulties of living in amilitarized, impoverished part of the world, as well as the dreamsand possibilities spawned by great wealth. They can help theirneighbors and try to buy a reasonable measure of stability, butthey cannot remake or keep the entire region afloat, tame all itspassions, deal with all its grievances. They can influence otherArab states but cannot dictate their policies because they havedifficulty "converting" the medium of power they have —money —into other assets. This was most poignantly demonstrated by

"John C. CaniplwU. "Oil Power in the Middle Easi." Foreign Affain. October 1977. pp. 89-!10." Fouad Ajami, "Stress in the Arab i riangle/'/^orpignfo/jo. Winter 1977-78, pp. 90-108.

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President Sadat's margin for maneuverability in his dealings withSaudi Arabia. "Petro-power" has more sway in Arab life than it dida decade or two ago, but it is a vulnerable kind of power; with thelogic of numbers and demography so heavily stacked against it, itneeds allies, protection and a great deal of subtlety and caution.

For quite some time - if only because of pan-Arabism's noise andrefusal to play by the rules of the game of states-a view prevailedin the West and among some of the Arabs that, if pan-Arabismwere to subside, all would be well. States would be left to undertakewhat states undertake within their boundaries; the conflict withIsrael would be resolved, or at least transformed and made morelike other conflicts, less lethal, less resistant to resolution. There isa great deal of merit to that view, but the politics of states can alsokill, can dislocate, destabilize and erupt into turmoil and violence.With economic development approximating a new raison d'etat,states can lose their legitimacy because they fail to deliver thegoods-not intangibles such as identity, but tangibles such as jobs,education and food.

In a world of states we cannot be sanguine about saying that astate system has been normalized. The state next door may movein, not in the name of something lofty and metaphysical like pan-Arabism, but, again, for something more tangible-to preemptthe dangers of an unstable state next door (Syria and Lebanon), orto avert the troubles of an erratic leader and to annex a wealthyneighbor at the same time (Egypt and Libya). Counter-elites andyoung officers may rebel, not in the name of pan-Arabism, butbecause they have a better cure for the ailment of the state. And ina situation of that kind, "betrayal" of obligations to other statescould be a convenient justification for a political game that remainsdangerous and deadly.

There are plenty of things to work out and fight over in theArab system of states: the "responsibility" of the rich states; the"rights" of the poor states; the usual struggle for primacy andadvantage among the resourceful and skilled states; the quest forself-determination on the part of the Palestinians; the restorationof civil order and legitimacy in Lebanon; the struggle of the mosteconomically pressed, yet preeminent Arab state for economicsolvency and viability. The passing of pan-Arabism means justthat: the end of one set of troubles. Normalization of the Arabsystem, on the whole positive and overdue, brings in its train itsown troubles, inflicts its own wounds, commits its own errors.